[23988] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Script of my national radio report on teens
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lauren Weinstein)
Tue Jul 14 10:53:33 2026
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2026 07:38:10 -0700
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
To: privacy-dist@vortex.com
Message-ID: <20260714143810.GA32231@vortex.com>
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This is the text of my national network radio report yesterday
discussing the misbehaving teens turned over to police by Waymo, and
the broader implications of surveillance and actions by robotic
vehicles. As always there may have been minor wording variations from
this script as I presented this report live on air.
- - -
So in 1951 the great science-fiction author Ray Bradbury published a
short story called "The Pedestrian". It told of a robotic police car
roaming a future city looking for so-called "unusual" behaviors -- in
this case walking alone at night. And a pedestrian in the story was
arrested by the car and driven off to be incarcerated.
There are many real world questions about robotic vehicles -- like
Waymo robotaxis -- and how they'll interact with our laws and privacy
rights and other aspects of society. There were new Waymo problems
again in San Francisco a week or so ago on July 4th, with their
apparently being unable to deal with the celebrations causing another
case there of Waymo triggered traffic gridlocks reportedly involving
at least dozens of the vehicles, Waymos reportedly running out of
power, reports of people being terrified when they saw a Waymo driving
right over fireworks that had just been lit -- yeah, kinda scary
stuff.
Most human drivers would know how to handle these situations but
robotaxis don't have common sense -- in fact Waymos were just recalled
due to an unfortunate tendency to drive into flooded areas, and first
responders continue to be angry about robotaxis interfering with
emergency operations.
Now we have an event in San Mateo in the San Francisco Bay Area that
invokes Bradbury's story and other predicted robocar scenarios. In
this case we have a couple of teenagers who were indeed misbehaving in
a Waymo. Reports are that they were drinking, but obviously they
weren't driving since they were in a Waymo -- and were shooting
Orbeez -- squishy soft gel water beads -- from a toy gun out a window. Some
of the details of this are still vague. But the bottom line is that
the Waymo diverted from the teens' ordered trip, took the teens to a
parking lot, stopped there, and called the police.
Apparently the police showed up in force, perhaps because Waymo didn't
understand it was a toy gun involved, so it's lucky nobody was injured
in that kind of police response situation. Early reports were that
Waymo locked the teens in the vehicle, which of course would have all
sorts of safety implications among other issues, but later reports
suggest that the doors were unlocked but Waymo lied to the teens and
falsely told them that there were maintenance issues to get them to
stay with the vehicle -- meanwhile Waymo was actually getting the
police involved.
Many of the stories about this seem to be taking a kind of chuckling
tone and saying gee wasn't this cool? And in this particular case
nothing obviously serious ultimately seems to have happened, at the
time of the last report I saw the teens hadn't even been actually
arrested or charged with any crimes. But a broader look at this
sequence of events and the situation in general seems much less clear.
One way to look at it is asking how a human taxi driver might have
reacted to the same set of circumstances. Probably they would have
told the teens to "knock it off" and if they continued to misbehave
kick them out of the cab. And probably they wouldn't have lied to kids
about a false taxi breakdown, secretly call the police, and sit in a
parking lot with them for the police to arrive.
But obviously robot vehicles, even when under remote control from
humans at a central facility, have a limited set of options since
there's no human driver physically present. Some observers of this
event have suggested that what Waymo did -- given that they're not an
agent of the government -- could be technically categorized as
kidnapping, even if it's viewed as a safety-positive action in this
case. And in fact the formal definition of kidnapping includes taking
someone where they didn't ask to be, by use of deception. Whether that
word is used isn't very important for now. And really we can put aside
for today the details of the teens' Waymo adventure.
But there's a whole long list of questions that have been percolating
in the background about robotaxis that are now pushed to the front of
the stage. These vehicles have cameras and microphones everywhere.
What kind of passenger activities inside would trigger the firms
diverting passengers to other locations against their will or
surveillance reports being filed? Could this capability be abused by
future authorities, or by hackers, perhaps on a mass scale by
technologically sophisticated terrorists? And that's just to start.
These may sound like sci-fi concepts but the reality of robotaxis is
already here and as a society we seem to be virtually unprepared for
its implications.
In Bradbury's story, there was only one police robocar for an entire
city. But Waymo reportedly has something close to a 1000 robotaxis in
San Francisco alone, and many more in other cities in their rapidly
growing robotaxi fleets. Other firms are building their own robotaxi
fleets as well. How these vehicles are going to interact with
government authorities, and society more broadly, is far too important
to be left to the tender mercies of the Big Tech Billionaires in their
never ending search to maximize their profits.
So it's up to us to make sure that these firms act appropriately in
society's best interests and don't drive society, and all of us, right
off a technological cliff.
- - -
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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